Google Tweaks BigQuery Analytics Service

By Darryl K. Taft |
Posted 2011-11-21

Google has
updated its BigQuery analytics engine with new features
including a new graphical user interface, new APIs and more.

Google
introduced BigQuery at its 2010 Google I/O developer conference to enable users
to do large-scale internal data analytics. At Google I/O 2010, Google launched
a preview of the service to a limited number of enterprises and developers. Now
Google has delivered a series of improvements to the technology and is putting
one of Google's most powerful data-analysis systems into the hands of more
companies of all sizes, Ju-kay Kwek, product manager for BigQuery at
Google, wrote in a recent blog post.

Describing the
need for greater analytics capability, Kwek wrote:

Rapidly
crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this
has traditionally required tremendous IT investments. Imagine a large online
retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing Website
usage and purchase patterns from millions of Website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer
that wants to maximize its advertising impact by learning how its last global
campaign performed across billions of multimedia impressions. Fortune 500
companies struggle to unlock the potential of data, so it's no surprise that
it's been even harder for smaller businesses.

A Google Code Labs
effort, Google BigQuery is a SQL-like tool for analyzing massive datasets.
Google BigQuery Service is a Web service that enables you to do interactive
analysis of massively large datasets-up to billions of rows. Scalable and easy
to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data
analytics on demand.

Kwek said
Google has added a graphical user interface for analysts and developers to
rapidly explore massive data through a Web application. And the company also
has "made big improvements for customers accessing the service programmatically
through the API," he said. "The new REST API lets you run multiple jobs in the
background and manage tables and permissions with more granularity."

Kwek added:
"Whether you use the BigQuery Web application or API, you can now write even
more powerful queries with JOIN statements. This lets you run queries across
multiple data tables, linked by data that tables have in common. It's also now
easy to manage, secure and share access to your data tables in BigQuery, and
export query results to the desktop or to Google Cloud Storage."

Kwek cited
Michael J. Franklin, professor of computer science at the University of California,
Berkeley, as saying BigQuery (internally known as Dremel) leverages "thousands
of machines to process data at a scale that is simply jaw-dropping, given the
current state of the art."

Meanwhile,
"BigQuery is available free of charge for now, and we'll let customers know at
least 30 days before the free period ends," Kwek said. "We're bringing on a new
batch of pilot customers, so let us know if your business wants to test drive
BigQuery Service."